service virtualisation

Over the last several years CA Technologies has acquired a number of companies and their respective products, to augment its continuous delivery suite and, especially, its DevTest portfolio. In particular, it has recently acquired Grid-Tools and Rally Software. Bloor Research has been asked to explore how Grid Tools’ products – now known as CA Test Data Manager (formerly Datamaker and CA Datafinder) and CA Agile Requirements Designer (formerly Agile Designer) expand and augment the capabilities provided by CA Service Virtualization (previously iTKO’s LISA) and CA Agile Central (formerly Rally), making the whole greater than the sum of the parts.

CA’s portfolio is designed to drive efficiency from planning through production. A core component of our continuous delivery portfolio is CA Release Automation, a market-leading application release automation solution that delivers full application deployment automation and release coordination across stages, environments and teams. The solution’s analytic capabilities enable DevOps teams to plan, manage, analyze and optimize the continuous delivery pipeline from a single control point. In addition, the portfolio includes CA Agile Central, CA Agile Requirements Designer, CA Service Virtualization and CA Test Data Manager. We continue to invest in and enhance the portfolio, most recently via the acquisition of BlazeMeter, an innovative, SaaS-based performance and load-testing solution.

Software delivery processes and systems, and the people involved with them, are under increasing pressure. Sometimes it’s digital transformation, other times it’s simply the challenge of keeping up with the demands created by ever more dynamic markets and an escalating pace of change. None of this is news, but is does provide an important backdrop to the discussion of how software delivery needs to evolve, especially given that traditional methods and approaches were never designed to deal with the fastmoving and unpredictable environment you are probably working in today.

Take an idea from design to deployment at pace— without compromising quality—using an end-to-end, continuous delivery ecosystem that’s capable of driving rigorous testing from the desired user functionality.

Ubiquitous connectivity and mobile devices have changed everything, opening up markets to millions of new consumers across the globe. Within the past few years, nimble upstarts have created mobile apps that have converted banking customers, cab riders and hotel guests at unprecedented rates. Large, established brands are scrambling to transform their businesses in order to maintain market share. To compete in this application economy, you must adapt or be left behind.

In a series of articles Paul Gerrard, a testing guru and consultant, discusses a range of testing topics. Test models are fundamental to testing and, in this article, Paul talks about the art of creating and using models. If testers are “shifting left,” pairing with developers or at least working more closely with developers, testers (and developers) need to be able to create models, learn how to articulate and share them, and support better collaboration.

Generate rich virtual data that covers the full range of possible scenarios and provide the unconstrained access to environments needed to deliver rigorously tested applications on time and within budget. Model complex live system data and apply automated rule-learning algorithms to pay off technical debt and uncover in depth understanding of composite applications, while exposing virtual data to distributed teams on demand and avoiding testing bottlenecks.

A lot can be learned from getting a group of experienced CIOs in a room and encouraging them to talk freely about the topics at the front of their minds. Rarely do they want to discuss technology, and even the latest IT industry ‘hot topics’ usually don’t get that much airplay. Conversations, and sometimes quite heated debates, tend to revolve around broader business-related trends, how these are changing stakeholder and user behaviour and expectations, and how best to respond to such dynamics.

Continuous Delivery has become somewhat of a buzzword in the software development world. As such, numerous vendors promise that they can make it a reality, offering their tools as a remedy to the traditional causes of project delays and failure. They suggest that by adopting them, organizations can continually innovate and deliver quality software on time, and within budget.

Organizations today are reevaluating their security strategies as they move their data and applications to the cloud. This whitepaper by Bloor Research discusses the challenges of security in the cloud and how the use of cloud-based services will enable organizations of all sizes, from the very smallest to multinational enterprises, to put trust back into the security equation.